Ethernet is a best effort transmission protocol. Internet Protocol (“IP”) also provides best effort delivery. These protocols may rely on the transport layer to provide reliable delivery. For some applications, having the transport layer provide reliable delivery of packets is not an acceptable solution as the transmission semantics may not work well with higher layer applications. For example, some applications that employ real time data transmissions (numerous examples of which can be found in Financial markets where the end hosts perform replication/coalescing, etc.), Transmission Control Protocol (“TCP”) layer retransmissions may significantly degrade application performance.